Posted on 03/03/2010 10:26:45 PM PST by neverdem
Mitochondria can trigger a lethal immune response after injuries.
Carl Hauser's patient was dying. A broken pelvis had brought the patient to the hospital, and now it seemed that a severe bacterial infection was killing him. Hauser — a trauma surgeon at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson — and his colleagues performed test after test, but could not find any sign of infection. Finally, with nothing left to try and time running out, Hauser removed a 30-litre mass of clotted blood. His patient immediately recovered.
It would take Hauser over 15 years to determine why the patient's own damaged tissue nearly killed him.
In a study published today in Nature, Hauser, now at Harvard Medical School, in Boston, Massachusetts, and his colleagues show that molecules produced in mitochondria — the energy-producing structures in cells — escape into the bloodstream during severe trauma, and can fool the immune system into thinking that bacterial invaders are on the loose1.
The immune system's response to this perceived invasion can be deadly. A condition called systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS) can lead to fever, a racing heartbeat, breathing difficulties and, eventually, organ failure. Caused by infection or by trauma alone, SIRS accounts for most of the deaths that occur in hospital intensive-care centres.
"If you twist your ankle and it turns red and swells, that's fine," says Hauser. "If you have such a huge injury that your whole body turns red and swells, you can end up on a ventilator and dialysis with multiple organ failure."
Mistaken identity
The symptoms of trauma-induced SIRS resemble the inflammatory response to severe infection, known as sepsis — but unlike sepsis, there need not be an infection present. As a result, physicians initially thought that a release of bacteria from the gut (rather than bacteria...)
(Excerpt) Read more at nature.com ...
“..Because mitochondria are descendants of ancient bacteria that were engulfed and then enslaved by host cells, Hauser reasoned that mitochondrial molecules could resemble bacteria closely enough that they could fool the immune system into thinking an infection has begun.”
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Makes sense, that theory about mitochondria is accepted Biology 101.
“A condition called systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS) can lead to fever, a racing heartbeat, breathing difficulties and, eventually, organ failure.” This happened to my on my first date. She was really disappointed.
Great find.
Double hitter ping tonight neverdem.
In the example cited, this cellular trash apparently came from a mass of clotted blood.
30 liter clot of blood?
That’s a lot of blood...where did it come from? the body only has 5 or 6 liters of blood in it...
Ping! (Thanks, neverdem!)
It does seem a bit much...
multiple transfusions
Yeah, I was wondering about that too. Only thing that makes any sense at all is that he’d gotten multiple transfusions, combined with internal bleeding into the absdominal cavity. But even then, unless the patient was huge, you’d think his abdominal cavity would have burst long before it accumulated 30 liters of clotted blood.
Something tells me this article is going to be sent back to its maker for repairs and look very different by this time tomorrow.
Misplaced decimal (3.0 liter would be a more reasonable figure)
Interesting.
Isn’t this similar to the theory about the “swarming” involved in some types of flu. The body attacks itself, mistaking it for invaders? Something like that.
Even a 3 liter clot is huge. 30 liters is not remotely possible.
IMO a 30 ml clot could do the damage. I have always recognized that massive trauma to tissue results in the same symptoms as described before sepsis sets in and I always attributed it to tissue toxins (even though I had no idea what specific toxins they were). 30 liters? Not even in a horse...
Yeah, 30 liters of water weighs 66 pounds!
30 Millilitres, OTOH, is easily believable.
Perhaps the reporter that coughed up this article doesn't know a l from a ml.
That, or the guy had a 7 GALLON blood clot ...
Even a 3 liter clot is huge. 30 liters is not remotely possible.
*****
“Journalists” are severely math challenged these days. But just the mental image of 30 liter boxes of juice or milk or soup should trigger some kind of reality check.
That is one reason why the word “trillion” does not cause fainting spells, or “global warming by Gore” can be treated as a potentiality.
You may have seen this already but it is a useful tool for expressing a trillion dollars. http://www.pagetutor.com/trillion/index.html
That’s what I thought. Imagine 15 2-liter bottles of coke together. Has to be a typo, that imagination-lacking MSM writers and editors didn’t pick up on.
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